A Ride into the Mountains is a great mobile experience

Plus Dropchrod, The Drowning, Dragons of Atlantis, and Bad Traffic

We’re back with another round of mobile titles you should take a look at. It’s no easy task finding actual good mobile titles as we get a couple of dozen requests A DAY, from indies to major companies. It’s no wonder many dedicated mobile game review sites charge the developers for reviews. True story.

Anyway, we have another round of five mobile titles that peaked my interest the most. Four of the titles just came out this week, while one is a bit of an older release but it deserves some attention.

Dropchord – developed by Double Fine

The latest from the minds of Double Fine is a music/rhythm driven score challenge game. Basically you place two fingers on a circle in order to create a line. With that line you’ll then rotate it around within the circle to hit targets that pop up, all while avoiding danger that can break your multiplier.

The visuals are quite wonderful, and it’s all backed by a pretty great score.

Dropchord is available for $2.99 on the App Store and Google Play (Plus PC, Mac, and Ouya).

A Ride into the Mountains – developed by Lee-Kuo Chen

This one is a retro style action game that sees you on horseback taking out enemies with your bow and arrow. Touching and holding your finger on the screen will allow you to shoot your arrows further, but you’ll need to lead targets like you would in real life. The game auto-scrolls you through the levels, but you can move your horse back and forth to avoid attacks via the motion controls.

The overall art style will remind you of Sword & Sworcery, mixed with the combat from that Hunger Games game. Yet it’s able to maintain it’s own identity, and it’s quite a compelling experience. Lovely visuals, a great soundtrack, and fun controls all go to pulling you into the story A Ride into the Mountains wants to tell you.

A Ride into the Mountains is available for $0.99 on the App Store and Google Play.

The Drowning – developed by DeNA

This is one I’ve been keeping an eye out for awhile now. The Drowning has been billed as a console-quality first-person shooter featuring a control scheme that would make virtual joysticks a thing of the past.

It’s none of those things, I’m afraid. Really this suffers from what every other FPS game suffers from on the mobile platform: They just don’t work unless you have an actual controller with buttons. You’ll be blocking half the action with your fingers, and there’s the limited controls make it hard to do multi-tasking like moving, aiming, and shooting at the same time.

Some genres you can replicate on the mobile to overcome the limitations, you just can’t with shooters.

The Drowning is available for free on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Dragons of Atlantis: Heirs of the Dragon – developed by Kabam

Real time strategy games are great, but they’re even better when dragons are involved. Dragons of Atlantis: Heirs of the Dragon is a game where you raise armies to take on enemies. And yes, you have dragons as part of your army.

This is actually based on Dragons of Atlantis the web game, which has pulled in $100 million in gross revenue in less than three years. So I guess it’s pretty good!

Dragons of Atlantis: Heirs of the Dragon is available for free on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and a Google Play version will be released soon.

Bad Traffic – developed by GreenCod

Bad Traffic is two games in one as it plays to your naughty and nice side. In one mode, you’re tasked with sending traffic through intersections without causing the vehicles to get into an accident. In the other mode, your only purpose in life is to create as much chaos and destruction with the cars as possible.

Pretty simple, but it also gets really addictive really fast.

Bad Traffic is available for free on Google Play, and $1.99 on the App Store.